Economic linkage

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I see Sam's post on economics as a discipline has now drawn a fewresponses. As I mentioned in the post that prompted Sam's, I don't find the whole 'is economics a (hard) science'' debate particularly useful. Unfortunately, that also means I'm not well-placed to respond to Sam's questions. So instead of a detailed reply, here are a few links — some recent, some not-so recent — which readers interested in the general debate might find of interest:

Last year Mark Thoma drew on these comments about why ecology is perhaps one of the 'hardest' branches of science to discuss the stimulus debate, in a piece which in parts reads quite like Sam's critique.

This is an interesting essay from a few years back by Greg Mankiw on the evolution of macroeconomic thought and 'the economist as engineer' vs. 'the economist as scientist'. (No prizes for guessing which end of this spectrum most interests me.)

Here's a video of a presentation to the Institute of New Economic Thinking by the super-smart David Hendry on the role of empirical evidence (I was lucky enough to have David as one of my supervisors when I was at Oxford). Note that provocative opening proposition, viz: the problem with empirical macro is that it's been so excessively simplistic to try to keep in touch with simplistic theory that it hasn't told us anything about the real world. But David has a solution...

Finally, to return to the topic of my original post, this is an interesting piece by James Surowiecki arguing that, although the recent US fiscal stimulus was in fact an economic success, it has now turned into a political failure and, moreover, that some of the very same factors that contributed to the former may also have contributed to the latter.